Understanding science is not always as hard as you think

I will say this approach is easier when you have had someone you trust teach you how to read scientific papers. In undergrad and in med school, professors would present us with two similar papers both published in top journals and ask, "Which one is wrong?" It was a highly valuable training exercise for me. The gist of the message that I got was this: (1) If you really need to understand the paper, ignore the discussion (and, sometimes, the results) until you have mastery of the methods and figures. (2) If you are really lost, read the discussion to see what the author thinks she is showing, then go back to the results to see if you agree.

People don't know how to read scientific papers. They don't know how to find the story in the stilted and stultifying prose. They don't know that you can skim bits and return to them later, you can read through to get the sense, then return to see the details.

And it's got scary looking equations.

But in my experience, people don't want to merely understand the existence of that trend. They want to understand the broader ideas of climate science, evolution, medicine, etc. That means understanding where the data comes from, what sort of filters have been applied, what principles account for it, how those principles have been lab-tested and on what scale, etc.

It's that sort of understanding that's hard.

The equation on page 4 is enough to confused people, especially with C_H is described as "any homogenisation adjustment that may have been applied to the reported temperature."

It does't appear to be doing any high level math, but lots of people don't remember that (x^y)(x^z) = x^(y+z) so its going to be hard to get through a paper like this.

That being said, the number of people who could read this and understand it does seem to be much higher than I thought before.

That would be a wonderful CSV file to play around with. It couldn't be that big of a file either.

If they'd created a small model of the Earth and applied what they know in order to determine the truth of their hypothesis, than yes, I would say they're doing science. Has the bar really dropped this low?

Based on the above, it should be noted that anomalies are signed, and an anomaly of +5 is bigger than an anomaly of -10, if I understand correctly.

I kept myself in challenging work and average 10-15 hours per week studying CS concepts. Now those same subjects that kicked my ass seem not only comprehensible but beautiful. What was a poorly-motivated technical mess of symbols (to me) I can now relate to real concepts in CS, and I could play with them if I needed to. (Godel numbering? Oh, that's Lisp encoded in the integers. Primitive recursion? It's a for-loop.)

So it seems like I'm "smarter" at 26 than at 22, contrary to stereotype. Because I have more experience to relate new concepts to, I find it much easier now to learn new concepts in mathematics and science, except for the fact that I have 1/4 as much time in which to do so.

The problem is that most people are taught subjects like algebra and calculus without much motivation and with no prior experience, so only natural ability and parental expectations can drive people to learn them. Calculus isn't actually hard, unless your algebra sucks. Algebra is only hard for so many people because it's poorly-taught and often not well-motivated, so only people who get a lot of encouragement (often because of natural ability and a developed inclination to solve puzzles) learn it.

The lesson I take away from this is that education (about sciences, but also literature and history) isn't something that should occur only for those who are too young to be economically useful; it ought to be an ongoing process.